I am running Mint 19 xfce 32-bit on a Pentium 4 with 1gb of RAM. Works okay. Not seeing showed records, but useable for, like, 2 or 3 tabs or for word processing. You could probably do a bit better with that system.

Damn, a dv6000 series, I had a dv6175 twenty years ago....

What are your plans for it, you mention saving it from ewaste due to it's many ports, so I suspect you will use it for diagnostics or labwork.

If so, you would probably be best suited with an older version of Ubuntu, possibly something like 8.04 or so.

That should run decent on the machine and allow you to use the ports for whatever labwork/testing you may require.

But be careful and avoid browsing the public internet with it.

That's a really old system, here's my recommendations in order:

1. Linux Lite
2. Lubuntu
3. Q4OS

All of these have minimum system requirements that are lower than your system, so they should install and run fine. USB should be fine to boot and install any one of these.

I wasn't sure what to recommend so I found this.

https://distro.watch/distros/category/ram-2gb

USB should work fine assuming the system itself can boot to usb (googling it looks like it can, you may have t hit delete to enter the bios to tell it to boot to usb first though)... distro inherently isn't a huge varient in terms of resources used however desktop environment is. You absolutely want something with a very light desktop manager, LXDE, XFCE etc... So depends, if you are looking for something very simple... I'd say probably Linux Mint XFCE edition, if your goal is to learn how linux works, don't mind reading up some documentation, arch linux is amazing.

If you have experience with any distribution or like something, almost every distro has a version that's distributed with a light weight desktop manager. The desktop manager is where the bulk of the system requirement weight is.

can I share it with a group like that too? like 1003?

UUID=666 /media/userName/Data auto uid=1000,gid=1000,groups=1003 defaults,nofail,x-systemd.automount 0 2
?

You can't set permissions and ownership because NTFS doesn't support Linux style permissions and ownership.

Why not copy the data elsewhere, format drive to ext4 or btrfs, then copy the data back? Don't use NTFS on Linux unless you enjoy having less control, unless you're sharing the drive with Windows then you have no choice I suppose.

TLDR: NTFS bad (not really, but sort of).

If you are staying on NTFS, you can stop reading here.

Anyway if you decide to migrate off NTFS, and assuming your username is zapBrannigan:

(recursively sets user ownership to zapBrannigan, sets group ownership to root, setting the group to root is a nice default because it's effectively "no group" and limits access to non-privileged, non-you users)
sudo chown -R zapBrannigan:root /path/to/drive

(recursively sets user, group, other permissions, where 664 corresponds to "allow rw-rw-r--", in this representation, the mode bits 664 are a binary mask, 6=110, 4=100, so you're setting 110110100 which sets the allow described above)
sudo chmod -R 664 /path/to/drive

The first command sets ownership to you, the user. The second command allows the user to read and write every file, and other users to read every file, set to 660 to forbid other users.

After that I suspect your fstab issue will become solvable.

If anything scares you, audit the data and backup the critical segments before working with the drive. I am assuming you don't have free space to backup the entire drive, if you do, then just do that.

Try adding uid=<your uid>,gid=<your gid> to the mount options. id will show your uid and gid (probably 1000). That should give you ownership of the file system.

This is retarded behavior and one of the reasons really I dislike Gnome.

Or maybe hit shift multiple times which triggers accessibility features

From what I played around with it a few years back, iirc AutoHotKey scripts can be converted to AutoKey. However, AHK uses its own scripting language, and AutoKey uses Python.

Oh neat, I didn't realize they added Linux support!

No, but that looks suitable! Thank you.

Have you looked at AutoHotKey (AHK)?

Connect to your neighbor's portable beer cooler and turn it off when they go to the beach.

Uhh aside from the 15" and 16" models with dedicated graphics, Macs have had unified memory for a looking time now. As have all computers without dedicated graphics.

Out of curiosity, are your users running a ton of local LLMs? Because overall failure rates of the SSDs aren't high at all so I'm suspecting the users you support are doing something different

The Neo might turn out to have issues here because it only has 8 gigs of RAM which is no longer a thing with Airs, but that remains to be seen.

SSDs have a limited number of reads and writes. Once a unit of memory in the SSD reaches that limit, it is essentially burnt out and it can't be used again.

SSDs hide this burn out in two ways:

1. Have a little bit extra memory, so when a write fails it can be silently written to another unit instead, and the end user doesn't see the size of the drive go down.

2. Don't store data in the same place, spread data around evenly so the wear is spread around.

The problem is after a certain point, all the memory units are at the edge of burning out and the drive fails irrevocably.

Luckily, most of us aren't filling and emptying our entire drive over and over again (and in doing so wearing out the drive), so most of us won't run into this issue.

But using part of an SSD is really bad for the drive since RAM tends to be accessed and written to much more frequently which wears out the SSD.

We're seeing increased failure rates now in the M series macbooks since they use "unifed memory" (they put both RAM and VRAM in the same storage without increasing overall capacity) and needed to use their own SSDs as swap disks when they ran out of RAM/VRAM.

I keep hearing this however I am using SSD for 5 year with swap enabled. it didnt make any diffrence. does it make it slow?

Gotcha. If you have limited RAM and still need more than what Zram can offer, Zswap is probably the most sensible alternative, currently.

I have zswap enabled, not zram.

Were you using zram? Swap will kill most SSDs.

Im glad to hear that! Whenever I have changes for nvidia, I always need to "rebuild boot" and reboot, but that might be because I use "open = true" or because how I have home-manager setup.

No problem! I've been in a similar situation if you couldn't tell lol, I hope the changes work out!

I appreciate the common tip; I'll add that.

My rebuild switch reboot seems to be working fine, so I'll see what happens...

Thanks for the time to spent trying to help me!

honestly I just use the click to sleep instead of closing the lid. its not really to big a deal for me I just mentioned it to let you know other linux distros seem to some degree to have sleep issues to.

I don't know, I'm sorry. I hope you figure it out!